............' , j J" '* A THE NE.W YORKER Series tickets. Swakopmund being re- doubtably German and conservative in character, the local paper that serves it-the weekly Namib Times, pub- lished in Walvis Bay, just to its south- is partial to news from Germany. West Germany, naturally. In a single issue this winter, for instance, there was only one brief item from the United States ("Dominica recently became the 151st member of the United Nations," it read, in toto), but there were eleven dispatches from Germany, including a report from Munich that patients on anti-clotting drugs may begin to have dental troubles and one from Bonn to the effect that a child's best friend is its mother. The ultimate dis- position of Walvis Bay, a four-hundred-and- thirty - four - square - mile enclave that has been formally a part of South Africa since 1910, though it happens to be in Namibia, is so prickly an issue that in the negotiations about the future of the territory all parties concerned have agreed to put off resolving it untIl after independence. (Residents of Walvis Bay, unless born elsewhere in Namibia, couldn't vote in the December elec- tion. ) Walvis Bay, which was never part of German Southwest Africa, be- cause the British had established them- selves there in 1878, six years before the German colony came into being, is the only port along the Namibian coast that can accommodate ships of any substantial size. If South Africa eventually has to yield it up, as even the D. T .A. seems to feel that it should, that nation will lose a base of much maritime, commercial, and strategic value-one that, indeed, South Afri- cans occasionally liken to Gibraltar. As if to suggest that it is in no particu- lar hurry to dispense with Walvis Bay, the South African government has just built a new police station there. (Concurrently, the South African De- fence Force has announced that it is going to put up a new sports complex in Windhoek next year; the S.A.D.F. may believe that it is going to be in Windhoek in 1980 no matter what the rest of the world may decide or decree. ) Walvis Bay is also the center of the southeastern-Atlantic fishing industry. Its depths are so rich in nutrients that they have been described as plankton soup. Pilchards-a variety of sardine- thrive on the broth, along with kabel- jou, steen bras, and galJoen Of \\T alvis Bay's resident population of twenty- t-.- , .. seven thousand, nearly a fourth are connected In one way or another wIth fishing. Their ranks have been swelled for the last fifteen or twenty years by foreigners, many of them aboard Com- munist ships, but that hasn't much aug- mented the local economy. Some of the crews of the alien vessels do come ashore from time to tIme, but, aside from the Spanish and the Japanese, they are not big spenders. Swakopmund has a Kaiser Wilhelm Street, and, next door to the Adminis- trator-General's sum- mer fortress, a monu- ment to soldIers who died for the Kaiser in 1904 fighting against unruly natives. Al- though Windhoek's principal thoroughfare is a mere Kaiser Street, the capital also has streets named after Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, and, as a cul- tural sop to the non- Teutonic world, Shakespeare. In Na- mibia, thirty per cent of the white pop- ulation is of German origin. (Ninety per cent of the year-round Swakop- munders are.) The Germans in the territory have had their ups and downs. During the Second World War, when quite a few of them would have been happy to see Hermann Göring strut triumphantly down Göring Street, they were deprived of their local voting rights and were subjected to various confinements-internment in camps, house internment, district internment. "I was lucky," one German business- man told me. "I was merely restricted to Windhoek, though I could go to Swakopmund for a holiday with a doc- tor's certificate." The National Part) took over the governing of South Af- rica in 1 948 and the following year restored the South- West Germans' voting privileges-a gesture that un- derstandably brought many of the Ger- mans into the National fold. (Wind- hoek's central park bears the name of Hendrik Verwoerd, who led the Party as Prime Minister from 1958 to 1966.) In 1958, German was declared to be, along with Afrikaans and English, a national language for South- West-though, unlike the other two, not an official language. (South Africans are notoriously fond of petty ethnic differentiations.) Until very re- cently, South- West could count on a steady annual influx of immigrants from Germany, some of these special- ists, like brewmasters or sausage sales- men. Germans have traditionally . ..... -w",,"'" t)5 "., 1 f\ \ /' ( , VI' \t /;Ø tf" ' !lib -' - ... ""-svJ ....... " , .......--' \ , / ... .;.' ! J /f [' Robert Arthur. The name, the look, the finest there is. Sizes 6 to 18. From about $42 to about $114. A division of Dalton. Featured at fine stores everywhere Prices slightly higher an the West Also makers of James Kenrob and Hadley Active Sportswear Dalton Industries, Willoughby, Ohio and New York City